VOlUME 05 ISSUE 06 JUNE 2022
1Jingyi Xu, 2Jingdong Zhong
1,2School of English, Zhejiang Yuexiu University, Shaoxing, China
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ABSTRACT
The history of Western literature since the 18th century has witnessed some excellent works by women writers, however, due to stereotypes and the authority of male discourse, these writers still endured great pressure from society in the creative process. To break the authority and gain recognition, female writers gradually formed a narrative voice belonging to themselves. In her novel To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf uses a great deal of interior monologue and free indirect discourse to cleverly construct her narrative authority. This adequately denotes the essence of feminist narratology, which is the combination of feminism and classical structuralist narratology, and a way to study feminist works as well. Concerning feminist narratology, this paper investigates the concept of feminist narrative voice, three types of which are personal voice, authorial voice, and communal voice. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf mostly employs authorial voice. To gain a further insight into this, the paper discusses the origin and concept of feminist narrative voice, and then examines Woolf's writing techniques adopted in To the Lighthouse, the use of authorial voice and the construction of female narrative authority in the novel. The study concludes that the use of authorial voice in To the Lighthouse contributes to a shift in women's marginalization and the struggle for male dominance narratives, and demonstrates fully Woolf's feminist thinking throughout the work.
KEYWORDS:feminist narratology, authorial voice, narrative authority, Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse.
REFERENCES
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